Organon §110
Symptoms from poisonings agree with those from provings.
In the medical literature, there are reports of poisonings where healthy individuals (accidentally, for the purposes of suicide or murder, or under other circumstances) ingested large amounts of a medicinal substance. I have seen that the actions of the morbid malignities described in these reports agreed with my observations upon testing the same substances on myself and other healthy individuals. The writers of these toxicological reports recorded these previous cases as proof of the disadvantage of these violent things, usually only to warn against them; partly also to extol their art when, while using their means against these dangerous befallments, recovery gradually set in; and partly, when people thus afflicted died during treatment, to exonerate themselves by proclaiming the danger of these substances which they then called poisons. None of these observers suspected:
1. that these symptoms, recounted by them only as proofs of the harmfulness and toxicity of these substances, contained sure reference to the power of these drugs to be able to curatively extinguish similar ailments in natural diseases,
2. that these disease arousals were indications of their homeopathic curative action, and
3. that the only possible investigation of their medicinal powers rests upon the observation of the condition-alterations brought forth by the medicines in healthy organisms.
The pure, peculiar powers of medicines for curative purposes are not to be discerned through a. specious a priori sophistry, b. the smell, taste or appearance of the medicines, c. chemical processing of the medicines, or d. the use in diseases of one or several medicines in a mixture (prescription). One did not suspect that these histories of medicinal diseases would some day supply the first rudiments of the true, pure materia medica which, from the outset up until now, consisted only in false conjectures and fabrications, and which was as good as non-existent. 154
Comment
154 See what I have said on this subject in "Examination of the Sources of the Common Materia Medica," prefixed to the third part of my Materia Medica Pura. [This appears in Volume II of the English translation.]